Monster Mothers

OLPE, Germany -- The bodies of three German babies, all of whom appear to have been newborns when they died in the 1980's, have been found stuffed in a basement freezer in the cellar of a detached house in the town of Wenden, about 60 miles east of Bonn. The bodies were found after police received a tip from the woman's 18 year old son who discovered the bodies while searching for a pizza and she has been arrested. The woman has been placed under medical supervision after confessing because of her mental state and the corpses, which were wrapped in plastic bags, will undergo autopsies once they have thawed. The three children were not stillborn and would be approximately 17-23 years old if alive today. The woman, (Monika H, 44) her 47-year-old electrician husband, and three grown children (two sons, aged 18 and 22, and a 24-year-old daughter) have lived for years in the town but the mother claims the other family members were unaware of the babies in the freezer. The woman is believed to have hidden the three pregnancies from her family, giving birth in the bathtub and then placing the newborns in plastic bags, where they suffocated, before hiding them in the freezer.


Germany has been hit by what amounts to an infanticide epidemic:

• In April 2008, a dead baby boy was found hidden under rubble in a roadworks in Saxony, another baby turned up in a rubbish recycling center and yet another in an attic.


• In February 2008, police were called to a home in northern Germany where a dead child was discovered in the cellar.


• In January 2008, a 28-year-old German woman was charged with manslaughter after the remains of three babies were discovered in her house and the home of a relative.


• In December 2007, a 31-year-old woman was arrested after police recovered the bodies of five children aged between three and nine years old were found in a house in Darry, near the northern city of Kiel after being drugged and strangled.


• The same week a woman was arrested in Plauen in eastern Germany on suspicion of killing three newborn babies she had given birth to. The bodies were discovered in a trunk in the cellar, on the balcony and in the fridge.


• Last November 2007, a 35-year-old woman from Erfurt was sentenced to 12 years in jail for killing two of her babies and hiding their bodies in a freezer.


• In January 2007, a 21-year-old admitted giving birth to three children and then hiding their bodies in her garage in the town of Thoerey in the eastern state of Thuringia.


• Another woman, Sabine Hilschenz, was convicted of manslaughter in 2006 for killing eight of her babies and burying them in flower pots and a fish tank in the garden of her parents' home near the German-Polish border. She is currently serving a 15 year prison sentence.


• Last year a 39-year-old Bavarian mother was put on trial for strangling her baby daughter and putting her in the icebox. One dead infant was found dumped in a car park litter bin. Others have been dropped, wrapped in plastic shopping bags, into lakes.

The motivation for baby killing appears to be rooted in a sense of being overwhelmed by responsibility, and the terror of change within a male-female relationship. “Some women have a greater fear of losing their partners than of losing their child,” says the criminologist Professor Helmut Kury. “They take desperate measures to save a relationship.”

[NOTE: The spokesman of the Hagen murder squad described the family as a "completely normal, middle-class family."] YIKES!

Compiled from The Irish Times, RTE.ie News, Berlin AFP, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, BBC News, Times Online, Deutsche Welle and The Associated Press